


Ways of Making You Talk

by houseofthestars



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alcohol, Drunk Sex, Fluff and Smut, Hand Jobs, M/M, Post-Black Eagles Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), fancyhair von aegir, previously unreleased hubert grandma lore, the ancient vestra drinking song involves beheading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:01:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22130707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/houseofthestars/pseuds/houseofthestars
Summary: Hubert is rather inventive in his language, apart from when it comes to Ferdinand. Ferdinand intends to pull the words from Hubert’s mouth, one way or another.
Relationships: Ferdinand von Aegir/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 28
Kudos: 269





	Ways of Making You Talk

**Author's Note:**

> As is stated in the tags, CW for alcohol.

Ferdinand takes to the stage. The stage is the parlour room table, but anything and everything can be a performance for Ferdinand von Aegir, so it might as well be his debut at Enbarr Opera House.

He strikes a pose, wine glass in one hand, clears his throat, and then begins to sing:

“On the seventh day of Horsebow, the Emperor said  
Vestra, oh Vestra, bring me the heads of:  
An antelope! A beast! A demon! An…” his brow furrows briefly, but then he recovers, “...elephant! A Faerghan! And a… gardener?  
And Vestra said, I’ll bring you your heads  
On the final day of Horsebow.”

He makes a gesture with the glass towards Hubert, the last of the wine sloshing dangerously in the bulb, and grins, but Hubert shakes his head.

“Incorrect. Drink.”

“What? No! I definitely got those right.”

“You omitted the letter C.”

“I did not, I said, antelope, beast, clergyman, and then…” Ferdinand’s eyebrows furrow. “Whatever came next. Oh, bother, fine.”

Ferdinand drains his glass where he’s still stood on the table and pulls it back with a look of dissatisfaction when its empty far too quickly, leaving a damp red smear at the corner of his lip. “I need a top up,” he says, and then sways backwards slightly before regaining his footing.

“What you need is to get off of that infernal table,” Hubert says. “Watching you is making me seasick.”

He does put down his whiskey and reach for the wine bottle though, holding it out neck-first to Ferdinand, who takes his advice and clambers down before he meets the bottle with his glass. Hubert pours. As he does, his gaze settles on the blotch of wine at the corner of Ferdinand’s mouth. He should say something, he thinks.

He does not say anything. As usual.

\--

He had almost not said anything two hours ago as they left the opening night celebrations for Dorothea's latest starring role, either. They had reached the corner of the street that normally would send the pair of them their separate ways, and Hubert had been prepared to return to his quarters, shake off the remnants of the free champagne and resume his duties. But then Ferdinand had turned to him with a half smile, his hair curled into a braided knot at the crown of his head and a new green silk ascot at his neck the colour of leaves in sunlight, and a sudden need to prolong the evening had struck him.

It would have been an easy thing for Hubert to suggest they not part ways so soon, but he found himself unable to form the words, leaving him awkwardly lingering at the corner even as Ferdinand was making to leave. At the last moment, Ferdinand had turned back, caught him hesitating.

"Hubert? Is something the matter?"

"Ah. No. Do not concern yourself," Hubert had said quickly. Another failure on his part. Better to cut his losses and return-

“It is a fine night,” Ferdinand had said suddenly. “It seems a shame to let it go to waste. How would you feel about a drink back at the palace?”

“I received a bottle of Varley red as a… a gift, recently," Hubert had blurted. "I’m not much for wine. You would be doing me a favour if you were to have a glass."

“A generous offer! Very well,” Ferdinand had said, smiling, one hand coming up to his shoulder, as if to tug at a lock of hair that wasn't there. “If I would be assisting a friend, how could I say no? I only wish you had said sooner.”

\--

That had been three quarters of a bottle ago, and now Ferdinand settles himself down in the chair opposite Hubert. He has his glass loosely cradled in one hand, everything about him languid and good-humoured. “I had never heard of this song before, and I was quite sure I knew all the Imperial court drinking games,” he says. “You say you remember this from your youth?”

“Yes,” says Hubert, not planning to elaborate, but the whiskey he's been drinking to accompany Ferdinand loosens a memory as well as his tongue. "My father was never much for singing it, but my grandmother was fond of it, especially in her later years. Said it was almost as old as the Vestra line of servitude, though I rather suspect she may have just been saying that for dramatic effect.”

Ferdinand's eyebrows raise. “I have never heard you speak much of your family before. Did you spend much time with your grandmother?”

“Not after I entered her Majesty’s service,” Hubert says, tilting his glass left and right contemplatively, watching the amber liquid roll around. “Mostly I remember her being… loud,” he adds, which surprises him to admit. Family reminiscence is hardly his style, it's true, but the memory of the late Marquess’ booming voice lingers.

“Sounds like my grandmother too,” laughs Ferdinand. “But then, the Aegir household always was rather boisterous, as you can imagine. Anyway. It’s your turn.”

“Ah yes. You will forgive me if I forgo the table,” he says, but still rises his to feet, clears his throat, holds his glass out in front of him. The evening has unbuttoned collar and pulled his jacket from his shoulders, left him in his shirtsleeves and trousers; hardly professional, but Hubert finds it hard to care right now where Ferdinand sits loose-limbed across from him, watching him with that damned wine stain at the corner of his mouth.

With a voice that Ferdinand had been surprised to discover is halfway to tuneful, he sings:

“On the seventh day of Horsebow, the Emperor said,  
Vestra, oh Vestra, bring me the heads of:  
An antelope, a beast, a clergyman, a demon. An elephant, a Faerghan, a gardener and a Hrym.  
And Vestra said, I’ll bring you your heads  
On the final day of Horsebow.”

He turns to Ferdinand and bows, feeling rather pleased with himself, which Ferdinand quickly punctures with “I am afraid not. Drink.”

“Lies. I listed everything,” Hubert protests.

“Yes, but you said the seventh day of Horsebow when it was the eighth,” Ferdinand points out, and Hubert’s face falls.

“Damn and blast. I was so close,” he laments, taking another sip of his whiskey, and Ferdinand bursts out laughing.

"Are you mocking me?" Hubert demands, feeling heat in his face suddenly. He is definitely in his cups if something so trivial as Ferdinand's laughter is making him blush.

“No, no, it is not mockery, I promise,” Ferdinand says, laughter still in his voice. “I just… I enjoy seeing you like this.”

“Compromised? Unprofessional?” Hubert suggests.

“I was going to say... less tightly wound. Not just because of the whiskey, I mean. It is a recent but welcome thing. As if a weight has been lifted from your shoulders.”

“Oh. Hmm. Well. I suppose it has,” Hubert says simply, once he gives it some thought. “Not that our work is done, if it ever will be. But things have come to pass that certainly smooth the path that her Majesty treads. That we all tread now. And that is not without... comfort.”

“And for that I am glad. Though I do enjoy this tipsy Hubert also. Why, in just one evening I have not only learned an ancestral Vestra drinking song, I have even learned you had a grandmother. I’ve never seen you so candid, it is rather delightful.”

“Hmm, well. If only I could always be so,” Hubert says, and immediately curses the moment he ever thought of drinking. A silence falls between the two of them, and Hubert should have kept quiet the way he had at the crossroads. The way he had so many times before, for so long, because the pain of that interminable longing is infinitely preferable to the plunging freefall regret of this silence.

But then Ferdinand puts down his glass, and says "Oh really? Does that mean there is more that you have kept back from me?"

"Apologies," says Hubert, scrabbling to salvage the evening, somehow. "It is- it is better if we forget what I just said."

"There you go again, holding back on me," Ferdinand says, frustrated, and stands up, making his way over to Hubert before sitting on the edge of the table in front of him. He is too close, now, the brush of his shins against Hubert’s knees an intoxicating intimacy.

"Why don't you just tell me?" he demands.

"Tell you what?" Hubert says evasively, heart thumping unpleasantly in his chest, trying to look anywhere but at Ferdinand.

"Tell me what you've been keeping from me. If there is more to be said, let the words out."

"You know," Hubert says, slowly, realising, feeling his world lurch sideways.

'I want to hear it from you."

Hubert again finds himself caught between desire and fear, so much he could say bubbling on the edge of his tongue. But even as compromised as he is he cannot push them from his mouth, and he can see disappointment start to curl at the corners of Ferdinand’s demeanour.

So what he does is reach out with one gloved hand, as if crossing a great divide, and capture Ferdinand's own. He pulls it silently towards himself, and press his lips to the back of it, tries to push everything he cannot say into the skin. He can feel the warmth of Ferdinand’s body against his mouth and it burns.

And Ferdinand just gives him a lopsided smile, and then he says, “Kiss me, Hubert,” as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. And maybe it is, when Ferdinand is there to say the words for him.

Hubert tumbles over himself to acquiesce, standing up and pressing himself into the space between Ferdinand’s knees. He cradles Ferdinand’s head in his hands and touches his lips to Ferdinand’s own, once, then again. He kisses away that infuriating wine stain. He captures Ferdinand’s bottom lip between his own, feeling Ferdinand’s mouth move against his, hearing the tiniest _mmf_ in the back of Ferdinand’s throat like the most beautiful song Hubert has ever heard. He has to lick across Ferdinand’s lips then, he has to, and he thanks gods he doesn’t believe in when Ferdinand opens to him.

The wine is a sour note on Hubert’s tongue but he feels warmth flood from his cheeks and down his neck like he’s just downed the last of his whiskey, accompanying the sudden thumping of his heart in his chest. There’s a tilt to Ferdinand’s mouth that lets Hubert know he’s smiling as they kiss and suddenly he can’t stop a low chuckle from escaping from his own, which makes Ferdinand pull away lazily.

“You’re laughing at me,” he chides. “Ever the hypocrite.”

“Not at you,” Hubert promises. “At... this. The, the simp- how easy this seems, suddenly. Did all I ever have to do was drink with you?”

“No, Hubert,” Ferdinand says, reaching up and pushing hair away from Hubert’s face with a loose, swooping finger. “All you ever had to do was _ask_.”

“You absolutely cannot say that to me right now,” Hubert declares, and he has to kiss Ferdinand again right now, right now, so he does, he pulls Ferdinand’s face to his own and the hand that had been teasing at Hubert's hair wraps instead around the back of his head. Ferdinand’s fingers thread through his hair before they squeeze, gently tugging at his scalp, and he can’t help but make a noise at that, pushing himself closer to Ferdinand, the edge of the table pressing into his thighs. Ferdinand’s other arm wraps around him, dragging his hand up and down his spine, across his hip, as if Ferdinand is trying to map every inch of him through touch alone.

Hubert can’t resist reaching up, plucking gently at one of the pins in Ferdinand’s hair. “May I,” he says, reverent.

“So formal,” Ferdinand laughs, but doesn’t refuse, and Hubert slides the pins out, uncurls the braid, pushes his gloved fingers into the folds, cards through it gently so that Ferdinand’s hair falls loose like spun copper. It’s still a little damp at the scalp where it had been braided while still wet, still in sharp waves where the braid has shaped it.

“You are...” _Radiant_ , Hubert thinks, _exquisite, celestial,_ but he can’t speak them aloud, so he just kisses Ferdinand again instead.

Ferdinand’s hand returns to Hubert’s own hair, tugging at his scalp once more. Hubert can’t bite back his moan this time, which makes Ferdinand respond in kind and hook his shin around the back of Hubert’s thighs. With that, they’re too close now - too close for Hubert to deny how this is affecting him, too close for Hubert not to cant his hips forward, feeling heat flush his face, his neck, his chest with his boldness. But Ferdinand just moans again, fingernails scraping along Hubert’s spine through his shirt, nudging Hubert closer with the heel of his boot.

Hubert has to pull his mouth away from Ferdinand’s at that, though Ferdinand chases him, steals tiny kisses at the corner of his mouth as he talks. “I want you,” Hubert babbles, the words tumbling out of him before he can even think to stop them. “I’ve wanted you for so long.”

“Oh?” Ferdinand says in a shaky voice, dropping his mouth to where Hubert’s ear meets his jaw. “How long?”

Hubert can’t articulate the years in which this exact moment has seemed impossibly out of reach, not right now while his head swims with alcohol and the taste of Ferdinand’s mouth and the feel of his solid warmth against Hubert’s own body. And so all he says is “Too long.”

“Tell me,” Ferdinand says, and then groans when Hubert grinds their hips together again. “No, don’t distract me, I- fuck! I want to hear you say it. I want to know if it has been just as long as me.”

“Longer, most likely,” Hubert gasps, and he can’t stop himself gripping Ferdinand’s shoulders to get more traction. “Since not long after the war began. Since you-” and he hisses as Ferdinand’s teeth clamp on his earlobe, “ _Shit_ , since the mission to Lake Teutates.”

“The mission to- oh, really?” Ferdinand chuckles against Hubert’s neck, his fingers tightening in Hubert’s hair again. “I remember that. When we got caught out by the weather on the way, and had to wait it out—”

“In the barn, yes,” With Ferdinand wrapped around him he can say nothing but the truth anymore. “We argued over something trivial, of course, but the way you stood your ground, and the rain in your hair, I wanted to—”

Hubert nudges Ferdinand’s jaw up with a hand so he can kiss him again, but Ferdinand only allows their lips to be crushed together briefly before he tugs at Hubert’s hair to separate their faces. “No, Hubert, tell me, I want to know. What did you want to do with me?”

Hubert’s eyes fall shut, trying to avoid Ferdinand’s gaze, but he can still feel it burning into him. “I wanted to— this, but against the wall, but I could never—” he says, all in one long exhale, still grinding their hips together. But Ferdinand moans at his words, and Hubert has to open his eyes again just to watch him.

“You could have,” Ferdinand says, breathlessly, eyes fixed on his. “I would have let you, I always would have let you, anytime, wherever you had wanted.”

“You are going to kill me,” Hubert tells him, face deadly serious, and Ferdinand laughs as he he wraps his other leg around Hubert’s waist, hooking his ankles together shamelessly. Even now the man can’t keep quiet for a moment, he hums and sighs and gasps and murmurs “yes, like that,” between kisses, and Hubert’s blood thumps in his ears as his world dials down to the friction between the pair of them, the tightening of Ferdinand’s thighs around his hips.

Eventually Ferdinand’s hands let go of Hubert, legs unlocking, and Hubert almost whimpers with the loss before he finds Ferdinand shuffling backwards on the table, falling onto his back as he does so. It takes an “up, up here,” from Ferdinand before Hubert follows the thread of his thoughts and clambers up, his knees either side of Ferdinand’s legs now so that he can sink down and roll his hips deliciously against Ferdinand’s. The two of them groan and Ferdinand’s hands return to mapping the landscape of Hubert’s back, the back of his thighs, everything in between. The table creaks with the movement of their hips and Ferdinand sniggers into Hubert’s mouth before grabbing at the tails of Hubert’s shirt to pull it out from the waistband of his trousers.

Hubert can't help but gasp when Ferdinand’s hands reach for his stomach, his sides, the small of his back, grasping for whatever bare skin Ferdinand can find. His hands are blood-warm, callous-tipped, blunt nails that softly drag and catch on his skin, leaving electric trails though neither of them are breathing a word of magic. They’re perfect. And impossibly boldly, one hand skims lower, between their hips, over the front of Hubert’s trousers to drag the heel of his hand along the hard length underneath, and Hubert lets out a strangled cry, hips stuttering forward to follow Ferdinand’s touch.

"Is this what you want? Tell me," Ferdinand demands.

"Yes, yes," Hubert gasps, “I want it, please,” and sits up, resting his weight on his knees, so that he can start to tug at Ferdinand’s clothing while Ferdinand is still slowly, maddeningly palming at him. That ascot has to be the first to go, pin joining the pile of hairpins before the fabric is tugged away, before pulling his short collar loose. He wants to lean forward and to press his mouth to this newly exposed stretch of skin, use teeth and tongue to raise marks that will last, but Ferdinand’s hand between his legs has him captive. Instead, he pulls Ferdinand’s shirt open, drags his hands over the solid barrel of a chest he finds beneath, finely haired and scattered with freckles. He wants to run red lines across it all with his nails, form new constellations across Ferdinand’s skin, but removing his gloves feels like too much, too soon. Maybe one day, if this fever dream is to ever happen again. If this isn’t all something Ferdinand will just regret in the morning along with the wine.

“Tell me what you want,” Ferdinand insists, demanding even as his fingers pull at the fastenings of Hubert’s trousers. “Say it out loud for me.”

“Touch me,” Hubert pleads, and Ferdinand doesn’t hesitate to comply, opening Hubert’s trousers and pushing them down to his thighs along with his smallclothes. He brings one hand to his mouth, eyes fixed on Hubert’s own, and licks a stripe down his palm with such lurid confidence Hubert forgets the time, the day, where he is, his own name. Then Ferdinand has a hand around his cock and Hubert can only lurch forward, brace his hands either side of Ferdinand’s head, groan into Ferdinand’s mouth as they kiss. Take in the smell of Ferdinand’s hair, the last traces of the wine on Ferdinand tongue, the burn of Hubert’s knees as they brace on the wooden table.

It doesn’t take long, not with all his senses overwhelmed so, not with the knowledge that this is Ferdinand touching him, humming encouragement under him like _yes I want to hear you, come on, just like that_ and Hubert lets out a ragged cry as he comes, his knees almost buckling.

Ferdinand is kissing his neck, his jaw, the corner of his mouth as he comes back to himself, and the first thing he sees when his eyes open is Ferdinand, all copper hair and golden eyes and pure joy.

“There we are,” Ferdinand murmurs, and kisses him again, long and deep. When they break apart Hubert looks down at Ferdinand’s chest and stomach, feels his face and neck heat with the mess he’s made.

“I should— you—” he says dumbly, meaning many different things, but Ferdinand just sniggers again and pushes at his side gently with a grin, encouraging Hubert to clamber off him. Hubert flops onto the empty stretch of table beside Ferdinand, but the jolt dislodges something beside him, and it only registers that it’s Ferdinand’s empty wine glass by the time it has already crashed to the floor.

“Damn and blast,” says Hubert, and then starts laughing, and so does Ferdinand, and the two of them lay side by side on the table, half-dressed, laughing, watching the ceiling spin.

“Hubert von Vestra, you are a mystery to me,” Ferdinand declares after a short moment.

“Seems rather an odd time to declare such a thing, but do go on,” Hubert says, finally having the presence of mind to fish a handkerchief out of his rumpled trouser pocket and hand it to Ferdinand.

“So eloquent when you chose to be. Such a flair for your choice of vocabulary. And yet so tongue tied when it matters, it seems.”

“Yes, well.It would, however, appear that you have ways of making me talk.”

There are other words that Hubert has not yet been able to say. But as he rolls towards Ferdinand again, their mouths reaching for each other once more, a hope burns in his chest that Ferdinand may yet drag them out of him.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on twitter at @hausofthestars! We keep things clean on there, but if you enjoy fe3h fanart and shitposts feel free to join me.


End file.
